The last question was about where he felt most at home, since he’d grown up in Oklahoma, spent his career covering war in the Middle East, and had just written a book about renovating his family ancestral home in Lebanon, due out in March 2012.

“Home is where you want to be, and for me it has to be the family ancestral home in southern Lebanon,” he said. “My wife and I feel, once we’re there, tethered to it. There’s a certain peacefulness when I get there.”

What? How does a war correspondent find time to restore an ancestral home? No one even mentioned the title of the book. I wanted to find it.